Every city seemed to have its own color tone.
Coal-rich Mons was white everywhere. Since the French had occupied it after the French Revolution, many buildings' exterior ornaments had been removed; leaving them in place would have invited suspicion of opposing the republic. Only Mons's Clock Tower retained its lavish Baroque appearance.
Louis XIV had once called it the "White Tower." Even across all of Europe, there were only three such towers. Together with the town hall, it had witnessed the struggles of French, Dutch, Spanish, and other military powers for control of the city.
Van Gogh had also spent time in Mons, though he had not gone there to paint landscapes. He had gone to the mining district as a preacher.
He ate and slept alongside the miners and descended with them deep into the shafts, but his conduct displeased the church. Van Gogh was stripped of his position as a preacher, and that set him on the path to becoming a painter.
Van Gogh's paintings were always rich in color. Mons meant "high mountain" in Latin. A castle had been established there in 642, but little remained of its Middle Ages heritage—only fragments of eleventh- and thirteenth-century walls, several solitary cells, and the ruined walls of the Castle of the Counts of Hainaut.
Like Brussels, it had suffered bombardment from Louis XIV. Yet unlike Brussels, after the city was damaged, the people of Mons immediately painted the facades of certain special houses in vivid colors rather than rebuilding them. By the end of the eighteenth century, they had all been coated in white plaster.
War had visited this city far too often. Logically, as the capital of a duchy, it should have had a cathedral on the same level as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. When the Ancient Roman